Amos Cummings is believed to have been the first newspaperman to see the news value of the lost child or the steer loose in the street. Amos himself wrote a story about the steer. Ralph wrote another one, and got his first job in New York on the strength of it. Frank W. O’Malley wrote one recently, and made New York laugh over it. But your newspaperman needs something besides a frightened steer and some streets; he must have “something in his noddle,” as Mr. Dana used to say.
Every reporter gets a chance to write a story about a lost child, but there are perhaps only two lost-child stories of the last thirty years that are remembered, and both were Sun stories. David Graham Phillips found his lost child in the Catskills and wrote an article over which women wept. The next time a child was lost, Phillips’s city editor sent him on the assignment, and he fell down. The child was there, and the woods, and the bloodhounds, but the reporter’s brain would not turn backward and go again through the processes that made a great story. Hill’s story, which is remembered by its head—“A Little Child in the Dark”—will never be repeated—by Hill.
The tear-impelling article is the most difficult thing for a good reporter to write or a bad reporter to avoid trying to write. It might be added that good reporters write a “sob story” only when it fastens itself on them and demands to be written; and then they write the facts and let the reader do the weeping. O’Malley’s story of the killing of Policeman Gene Sheehan, which has been reprinted from the Sun by several text-books for students of journalism, is good proof of this. Practically all of it—and it was a column long—was a straightforward report of the story told by the policeman’s mother. This is a part:
Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the darkened parlor of her home at 361 West Fifteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and told her version of the murder of her son Gene, the youthful policeman whom a thug named Billy Morley shot in the forehead down under the Chatham Square elevated station early yesterday morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that her boy hadn’t killed Billy Morley before he died, “because,” she said, “I can say honestly, even now, that I’d rather have Gene’s dead body brought home to me, as it will be to-night, than to have him come to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man this morning.’
“God comfort the poor wretch that killed the boy,” the mother went on, “because he is more unhappy to-night than we are here. Maybe he was weak-minded through drink. He couldn’t have known Gene, or he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they tell you at the Oak Street Station that the other policemen called Gene ‘Happy Sheehan’? Anything they told you about him is true, because no one would lie about him. He was always happy, and he was a fine-looking young man. He always had to duck his helmet when he walked under the gas-fixture in the hall as he went out the door.
“After he went down the street yesterday I found a little book on a chair—a little list of the streets or something that Gene had forgot. I knew how particular they are about such things, and I didn’t want the boy to get in trouble, so I threw on a shawl and walked over through Chambers Street toward the river to find him. He was standing on a corner some place down there near the bridge, clapping time with his hands for a little newsy that was dancing; but he stopped clapping—struck, Gene did, when he saw me. He laughed when I handed him a little book and told him that was why I’d searched for him, patting me on the shoulder when he laughed—patting me on the shoulder.
“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’ I said. ‘Then it must be bad for you, too, mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the end of his beat with me—it was dark then—he said, ‘There are lots of crooks here, mother, and they know and hate me, and they’re afraid of me’—proud, he said it—‘but maybe they’ll get me some night.’
“He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that?
“You know how he was killed, of course, and how—now let me talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the house, and I looked out the window and said:
“‘Is Gene dead?’